@gloomyandy I am curious about that too but will have to wait for the stock onboard ESP8266 firmware as I messed it up. You make a great point, I did not consider what the firmware on the LPC1769 is doing on boot. I did try forcing the multiplexer in one state or another by pulling the onboard ESP GPIO 0 to either GND or 3.3V, this actually causes the SD access LED to either turn on or off. Although the onboard ESP8266 RX and TX lines are connected to the LPC1769 on TXD0 and RXD0 so that might have something to do with it as well.
Only a handle full of random times did I get the board to respond to an M115 command, sometimes right after it installs the RRF firmware and then boots up. Any subsequent reboots puts the device in limbo and non operating mode.
This board might not be a good candidate for this, I did however learn a lot and will be messing around with this more as I have replaced this board with a Duet 2 wifi. I just really enjoy RRF and the DuetWifiServer, so wanted to run both on this board if possible.